Free Republic

I've always liked Wes Clark. I interviewed him in 2005, when the topic of torture was new and fresh in our minds and he told me how disappointed he was in Dick Cheney. Our cell phone connection was horrible, but he called me back from the airport. I say this because when I watched this segment I was as totally shocked as Digby was. I hope he rethinks his position after he listens to what he actually said. He's talking about bringing back WWII Japanese style internment camps to America, which has always been a blight on US history.

Can Donald Trump merely be an undisciplined bomb thrower driven by a massive ego? Or is there more going on with Trump than most of us would suspect? Is he so ego-driven that he would abandon his prior liberal positions on social issues and link arms with those on the far right? Trump is not an idiot. He knows he can't win with his self-destructive performance. I think what he's doing is preparing a pathway for the person he wants to win, Ted Cruz. It's a brilliant plan really. Trump's attacks bring down the moderate opposition for the Republican nomination...

Donald Trump “fired up the crazies” in his state when he held a rally in Phoenix last weekend, Arizona Sen. John McCain said in a recent interview. During that appearance (and others last weekend), Trump was joined by the father of Jamiel Shaw, who was killed by an undocumented immigrant. Trump has tapped into “some anger” in the state over the conditions at the border, McCain told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza in an article published Thursday. “It’s very bad,” the Republican senator said. “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me,” McCain said. “Because...

The National Taxpayers Union Foundation reports that Senator Ted Cruz (from Texas) has, during his time in the U.S. Senate, supported measures that would reduce government spending by $169.4 billion a year.Demian Brady, NTUF director of Research, is quoted by Breitbart as saying: Senator Cruz supported significant spending reductions like repeal of the Affordable Care Act and abolishing the IRS and income tax in favor of a sales tax. Combined with very minimal spending increases, these make for a legislative slate big on savings. And that’s not all. Cruz also wants to repeal ObamaCare which would reduce government spending by...

Soon opening, the Barack Hussein Obama II Memorial Park Much like when Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, who commanded the garrison at Arlington House, appropriated the grounds of General Robert E. Lee's mansion on June 15, 1864, for use as a military cemetery. Meigs intention was to render the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return. Much like the punishment that was placed upon General Robert E. Lee and his property to serve as a constant reminder that he was on the wrong side of the war, this Memorial Park is being named in honor of the...

Remember the beginnings of the Tea Party? Tens of thousands of conservative folks, energized and concerned enough to speak out and actively engage in politics. Or Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project? Rand Paul’s filibuster, which had people from both parties standing glued to the TV for hours? The media complex lowballed the number of those massive crowds and painted them as racists and extremists. The Republican establishment essentially turned their backs on the Tea Party and at times even joined in the ridicule, revealing a glimpse of embarrassment toward their own ranks. Even John McCain called fellow Tea Party-backed lawmakers “wacko...

Jeb Bush ought to be running away with the Republican nomination. He isn't, and his persona as a national candidate looks increasingly — how shall I put this? — Romneyesque. Bush is supposed to be the safe, establishment-approved choice, which is where the Republican Party usually turns. He and his allied super PAC have raised a phenomenal $114 million thus far. The hot mess that is Donald Trump ought to be sending GOP primary voters toward Bush's column in droves. But the scion-in-waiting hasn't yet consolidated the establishment's support. Instead, Bush made news for announcing an economic strategy that sounded...

One evening several years ago, John Mary was up late reading a local blog when he came across a comment from a man who said he lived in Gulfport, Mississippi. The commenter had been watching his kid mow a relative’s lawn, he wrote, when a couple approached the boy and asked if he could cut their grass sometime. The commenter recognized the man. It was Senator Thad Cochran, he wrote, and the woman with him sure as hell wasn’t his wife. The gossip stuck with Mary, a 62-year-old from Hattiesburg, about 70 miles north of Gulfport. But he didn’t think...

With his angry rants against undocumented immigrants, Donald Trump is a stark reminder of the GOP’s terrible problem with Latino voters. In short, Latinos don’t like—or trust—the Republican Party. But Trump also illustrates a second, more complicated problem. As long as his rhetoric has a place in Republican politics—as long as it has defenders—it won’t just alienate Latinos. It will offend and turn off voters who have conservative ideas and beliefs but won’t sanction or support anti-immigrant sentiment. Before looking at this other side to the “Latino problem,” it’s worth examining the first one. In the past two presidential elections,...

In a move that is difficult to describe as an accomplishment, there were so many haters in Arizona that Donald Trump had to move his anti-immigrant hatefest from the Biltmore Resort and Spa to the Phoenix Convention Center. By this morning, 9,000 haters had tickets in their hands. His campaign chairman, Corey Lewandowski, bragged, “We received 4,000 RSVPS in 2¹/₂ hours.” By this morning, Trump was claiming 15,000: Donald J. Trump ✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump Today I will be rallying with with 15,000 patriots in Arizona for border security! Let's Make America Great Again! https://www.donaldjtrump.com/ 11:48 AM - 11 Jul 2015 The...

How do you solve a problem like The Donald? That question is currently consuming the minds (and fueling the nightmares) of leading Republican power brokers. And you gotta have some sympathy for their plight. Actually, I take that back. It's entirely possible to have nothing but schadenfreude for what the GOP is going through. There is certainly a chickens-coming-home-to-roost character to Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the polls over the past couple of weeks. This is a party, after all, that has spent close to the entirety of the Obama administration stoking right-wing populism, encouraging conspiracy theories about the president...

Wisconsin governor posed with his wife's cousin and her new bride three days after state court struck down anti same-sex wedding law Walker said he supported emergency measure to stop same-sex marriages then went to Shelli Marquardt and Cathy Priem's reception The next month Walker wrote to conservative group he wanted to endorse him and said: 'I support marriage between one man and one woman.' But same-sex couple tell Daily Mail Online: 'He has been nothing but supportive of our relationship and wanted us to have love in our lives.' Walker will formally announce he is running for Republican White...

One year later, the aftershocks from Tea Party favorite Dave Brat’s stunning win over then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) are still rippling across Washington. (SNIP) Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) had just arrived at a birthday fundraiser for Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kan.) at Del Frisco’s Grille, a steakhouse near the White House. She would later tell McHenry that Cantor’s unexpected loss had made it her worst birthday ever. A few blocks away, Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) was sitting down to dinner with Republican Study Committee (RSC) Chairman

Nobody should be more grateful than Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature for the recent holiday weekend, and not just because they needed a break from the stress of budget-writing—though it’s apparent they did. Things closing last Friday for the Saturday holiday gave the other 5.7 million Wisconsinites a chance to miss the Joint Finance Committee’s extraordinarily ill-advised effort to exempt most communications involving state lawmakers from coverage by open records law. This ham-fisted insult to government transparency was walked back before the weekend was half over, in hopes of minimizing the damage. Which is a good thing, but it leaves...

Bernie Sanders may not be on his way to the Democrat nomination, but he’s bound and determined to make things uncomfortable for Hillary and continue amusing conservatives for as long as he can keep this broken field run going. Bernie was one of the guests on CNN’s State of the Union yesterday and Jake Tapper asked him about recent charges (from people like… Claire McCaskill?) that he was just too darned liberal to lead the Democrats’ ticket. Jake also noted that the Democrats in Congress weren’t exactly lining up to endorse him. Bernie wasn’t gong to let that ruffle his...

The Republican Party, broadly speaking, is comprised of many factions that are often at odds with one another. Prominent examples are the battles between the grassroots and the national party establishment and between defense hawks and non-interventionists. Perhaps fiercer than any of these fights is the long-standing conflict between social conservatives and libertarians. But when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last month, they created an opening for a wedding between these two groups, which could benefit the Republican Party ahead of the 2016 election. To be clear, libertarians come in many stripes. There are those who reject the political...

“He never apologizes, he’s never wrong…he’s the white Kanye!” – Bill Maher On the last HBO “Real Time with Bill Maher” episode before the July vacation hiatus, host Bill Maher was joined by mid-show interview guest Judd Apatow, and panelists Kristen Soltis Anderson, Michael Eric Dyson and Mary Katharine Ham, who hashed over the viability of Donald Trump as a GOP contender. During the segment, Maher quips he was waiting for the “Trump-Christie” GOP ticket. Now that Christie has thrown his hat in the ring too, this is actually a remote possibility. Despite the unvarnished remarks slung by Donald Trump,...

It was a difficult marriage from the beginning. Its success was largely regional and state by state. But where it worked, it worked well, mainly the South and parts of the West. They papered over their differences for years. Now they've grown apart and a messy divorce looms. It wasn't exactly a shotgun marriage. The Wall Street/Koch Brothers crowd gleefully accepted the support of Tea Party and evangelical leaders, as long as austerity, high-end tax cuts and deregulation were part of the agenda. The cultural right needed money and legitimacy. Everybody got along. No more. The split was thrust into...

Former FOX and CNN commentator and show host Glenn Beck appeared on the Howard Stern show last week. What follows is a partial transcript of those segments where he discussed “Third Party” voting as well as those portions where he explicated (his version of) libertarianism. Stern: It’s Glenn Beck who used to be on FOX news. . . Beck: It’s good to see you. . . . Beck: One of the reasons I’m here today is because we’ve got to stop. We have to find the people who may vote different, may be different, have different philosophies, but we’ve got...

Facing enormous blowback, Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Thursday reversed course and said he was reinstating Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) as a subcommittee chairman. Chaffetz stripped Meadows of his subcommittee gavel last week after the congressman joined nearly three dozen other conservatives in voting against leadership on a procedural motion that nearly scuttled a major trade package.